JOSH: Hello, and welcome to Clearer Thinking with Spencer Greenberg, the podcast about ideas that matter. I'm Josh Castle, the producer of the podcast, and I'm so glad you've joined us today. In this episode, Spencer speaks with M.E. Thomas about psychopathy and sociopathy, empathy and personal boundaries, and the relativity of ethical behavior.

SPENCER: Jamie, welcome.

JAMIE: Thank you, Spencer.

SPENCER: Should people be afraid of you?

JAMIE: I guess so, because I'm a stranger and you don't know anything about me. I think that we should all have a healthy fear of other people a little bit.

SPENCER: But do you think that they should be afraid of you for an additional reason, that you're a sociopath?

JAMIE: I don't think there's really anything about me being a sociopath or a psychopath — I use those interchangeably — that would be more dangerous than, let's say, anyone who has high levels of testosterone. It's probably about equivalent.

SPENCER: Now you mentioned those two terms being used interchangeably, and I feel there's so much confusion around this. I was deep-diving today looking at these two terms: sociopath, psychopath, also ASPD (Antisocial Personality Disorder). And I'll tell you my understanding — you could tell me what I would get wrong or anything you want to add — is that ASPD is what's in the DSM, so it's a diagnostic and statistical manual, so that's what everyone in the US is using to diagnose disorders. Sociopath and psychopath are not used diagnostically today. However, there is the psychopath checklist developed by Hare, and that's a very popular checklist, usually used in prison populations to measure the trait of psychopathy. And then sometimes people seem to use psychopath to refer to more severe cases, or maybe cases where people were born with it, or maybe cases where people are more callous, while sociopath is used for somewhat less severe cases, or ones that were environmental, or ones where maybe there's more impulse control issues and less callousness. So, curious to hear your thoughts on that.

JAMIE: Yeah, I think you've done a great job summarizing it. I think that people use psychopath and sociopath for different reasons, but it's not really standardized. I think the best way to explain it is that the only reason I use the word sociopath is I had the impression that it was slightly milder than psychopath. It was less likely to be confused with psychotic. Somebody said you're a psycho. Is that saying psychopath or psychotic? And there was a popular book, The Sociopath Next Door. So I was just exposed to the word sociopath, but then I started recently using the word psychopath because I talked to some British people, and they said that at least in the UK, these particular people said they don't really use the word sociopath, and so I started understanding the word psychopath to be more of an international word, so that's why I've switched to using psychopath over sociopath.

SPENCER: Now do you think that you would also be diagnosed with ASPD if you were to go through a diagnosis?

JAMIE: I have actually been diagnosed with a personality disorder, otherwise unspecified by my therapist. His reluctance to diagnose me with ASPD was that there is no known treatment for ASPD, and so, for instance, I wouldn't be able to ask my insurance to reimburse me. It would be seen as being kind of a witch doctor to treat somebody with ASPD, is how he explained it to me, and he was worried about losing his license. But he did say, "Yes, I have a personality disorder, otherwise unspecified, with elements of ASPD."

SPENCER: Now I wanted to review some of the traits that are usually associated with psychopaths or people with ASPD, and just get your sense of whether you think you have them. Maybe get a few comments from you on them. Does that work for you?

JAMIE: Yeah.

SPENCER: So we look at the Hare Psychopathy Checklist. I kind of break them into four different subcategories, although there are 28 traits overall. The first are interpersonal traits, such as superficial charm, being a smooth talker, egocentricity and grandiosity, inflated sense of self-importance, lying and deception, conning, and lack of sincerity. Do you feel that you have those traits?

JAMIE: Yes.

Have you always had them? Or do you feel like you developed them over time?

JAMIE: I think that's hard to answer. I think that I probably wasn't born with psychopathy. You know what we know of DNA and everything else, that something had to trigger it. I think that those traits, I developed them, that they're more symptoms of what I think is a broader issue or disruption in my development. And so I don't necessarily even think of myself as having those traits, because I have a personality disorder. It makes it difficult for me to even identify with those things as being true about me.

SPENCER: Really interesting. So in what sense would you say you have those traits?

JAMIE: I would say that I have those traits in the same sense that I know my shoe size is eight and a half. I don't necessarily think of them as being me; I think that they're just the kind of shoes that I sometimes wear. They're things that are true about me, but they're not me. If that makes sense, I don't really have a sense of what is "me."

SPENCER: This is something that commonly comes up with people who are sociopaths, that they don't have a fixed sense of identity. It might be hard to even relate to that. For someone that does have a fixed sense of identity, they might think, "What does that even mean to not have one?" Do you feel like in different circumstances, you could kind of be anyone?

JAMIE: I feel like, because it's almost like a jailbroken phone that's capable of connecting to everything, it feels like I'm untethered; I don't have, kind of like normal people, who think of their sense of self as being like an anchor. Even though the ocean could push them one way or the other at any given moment, they're at work, they're acting a little bit different. They're at home, they're acting a little bit different, but they're never too far away from this anchor, this center that they have. For me, it's more like there's no anchor. It's very flexible the way that I'm able to interact with people. I can show up pretty much any way that I want to. Obviously not physically, but even sometimes physically. The other day, I had a very distinctive walk. I was walking towards my girlfriend, and I wondered if she would recognize me, so I kind of hid the walk. She said that she wondered if she was in a horror film. The way that I was walking was so weird. There is some ability to kind of adjust physically as well.

SPENCER: Oh, wow, interesting. Does that mean that when you're with different people, you act totally differently?

JAMIE: I would say so for the most part. It's not like I'm trying to put on a show for them. If there's no anchor there, then there's nothing tying me to a particular thing. I am very responsive to outside cues. I think too that I'm very easy to manipulate because of that, because I have no strong sense of self, like, "Oh, I would never do X, because I'm not that type of person." I think it's easier to get me to do things.

SPENCER: So interesting, because usually people think of sociopaths as manipulating others, not being easy to manipulate. Do people actually manipulate you?

JAMIE: Yes, all the time. I even welcome manipulation. I think it's one of the reasons why I did so well in therapy. Probably because it was pretty easy to manipulate me. The thing that might be a little bit harder is trying to outsmart me because I don't have a sense of self and the accompanying ego wrapped up in thoughts and ideas. I am pretty clear thinking, and I was born with pretty exceptional intellectual skills. At least I test really well all the time. That was one thing that I think maybe kind of saved me from a lot of overt manipulation, where I'd just be like, this doesn't make sense intellectually, rationally, it doesn't make sense. But if somebody told me something like, "Oh, these are my true feelings." I would just have to believe them because I don't know what your feelings are, for instance.

SPENCER: Your book, Confessions of the Sociopath, which I thought was really excellent, showed that you have real intellectual prowess that was obvious just from the writing and insight you had there. But I'm a little bit surprised about your welcoming manipulation, because what if the person is doing it in a way that's harmful to you or taking advantage of you in some way that will make things worse for you? Do you still welcome it in that case?

JAMIE: If I knew that it was harmful to me, then I'd say no, but I don't really have that good sense of what is harmful to me. I don't have a good sense of what's good for me or safe for me. I think this is actually one of the categories maybe in the Hare checklist that you were talking about: a disregard for the safety of yourself and others is a trait that I definitely identify with.

SPENCER: Interesting. Going back to the Hare checklist. So another one of those categories is affective or emotional, so lack of remorse or guilt, lack of empathy or lack of emotional depth, callousness, not accepting responsibility. It also includes proneness to boredom, lack of frustration tolerance, and difficulty controlling anger and aggression. Does that bucket of items sound like it applies to you?

JAMIE: Yes.

SPENCER: And regarding the remorse or guilt, do you feel like you've ever experienced guilt?

JAMIE: No, but I would say, I think it helps to kind of explain why not. I believe that guilt arises — seems to arise, from, just based on my observations — from people violating something about themselves. They think of themselves as being truthful, and then they lie. That's when they experience guilt, because there's an internal conflict there. Because I don't think of myself as honest, I wouldn't experience guilt when I lie, because I haven't betrayed my self-concept. I don't have a self-concept of myself as being honest. So I have no real dissonance or negative feeling from acting in a way that's not even contrary to my self-concept.

SPENCER: Oh, that's really interesting. What about shame, though? Because that seems more societal than guilt. Someone might feel guilty if they violate their own sense of what's good, but they might feel shame if they violate what other people think is good?

JAMIE: I agree about the shame that it seems to be somebody else trying to impose their values on you. I don't know if it's because of a sense of self, but I have not really been successfully shamed. I know that if somebody's trying to shame me, they're trying to punish me. I am aware that it's kind of an aggressive act to try to shame somebody, so I respond less to the attempt to shame and more to the perceived aggression in the shaming.

SPENCER: You mentioned in your book an example, I believe you were in the subway where someone tried to shame you. Could you tell that story?

JAMIE: So it was in the Washington, DC metro station. I was just trying to get to wherever I was trying to get to. I saw an escalator, and it was broken down, but I just walked down it because it's stairs. At the bottom of the escalator, a worker stopped me. At first, I was like, "Is he asking for directions or making pleasant conversation?" But it became clear he was trying to tell me that I was wrong for having walked down the broken escalator, which is really just stairs. I've done that all my life, especially in New York or other places where escalators often aren't working. It seems like in the subway, you just walk down the stairs. But he was, I think, more upset that I didn't seem to acknowledge the wrongness of my actions. Then he tried to shame me about it and said, "You know, didn't you see the sign? You weren't supposed to do that, and that's trespassing." He was trying to make it seem like I had committed this crime. Then he started walking away. I still did not feel the shame, but I responded to what I perceived to be his aggression, trying to shame me in a way that I call gray rage. Gray rage I experience when somebody who's not in a position of authority over me seeks to assert authority over me. It must be something about childhood trauma or something, but I immediately kind of lose it, and I call it gray rage. Actually, somebody else coined the term, but I like it because it's gray, it's not like red hot, it's just a full burn. After he left, I started kind of following him, thinking, I just have to destroy him. Those were sort of my ideas. When it's gray rage, you just are subsumed by the emotion. It's acting on pure impulse, and the impulse is just to destroy the threat, the thing that caused you to be triggered in this particular way. I was following him, thinking all these thoughts of the things that I would do to him, and then I just lost him in the crowd. I basically had to just go home, wherever I was staying at a hotel, and just rest because it's so exhausting, physically exhausting afterwards. The gray rage is just such an intense experience.

SPENCER: Do you think what would have happened if, instead of losing the crowd, let's say you cornered him in some secret place where nobody else could see?

JAMIE: I had the things that I had imagined doing were mostly choking. I don't know why in my mind I had the vision of just choking him. It doesn't make any sense. My more conscientious mind, the non-lizard brain mind, thinks that's stupid and ridiculous because I'm a five-foot-four-inch girl, and he was a six-foot-something guy, and there's really nothing I could do physically to him with just bare hands that he couldn't just push me off. But sometimes I wonder about other psychopaths, how crazy that must be to experience things like gray rage or these other impulses when you are a six-foot man and you experience testosterone. On top of all of this, I wonder if that must be very difficult for them.

SPENCER: I had an interesting experience related to gray rage, which is I was talking to someone that I thought might be a sociopath, and I was asking them about their emotions. I asked them if they feel angry, and they said, "Oh, no, I never feel angry." Then I said, "Okay, let me show you a video." I showed them a video of a sociopath describing gray rage. They said, "Oh, that emotion, I feel that like 30 times every day."

JAMIE: Wow, that's a lot, 30 times a day. Maybe this person was just exaggerating for humor.

SPENCER: They might have been exaggerating, but then they also told me that they keep a list of everyone who's wronged them, and every month they check it to see if they can hurt those people in any way without putting much effort into it, sort of low-effort ways of harming the people that wronged them. I'm wondering, does that resonate with you at all? This idea of wanting to take revenge on people that have done bad things to you?

JAMIE: I don't experience that as much as other psychopaths that I've met seem to experience. I've heard of some really long cons that people have done for people that have wronged them. I think that my guess, from my own experience, where my gray rage seems to come from, is that I was imposed upon, my personhood, my autonomy, severely when I was a child, and as a result, it's almost like a PTSD trigger when I experience the gray rage. It's obviously not the Metro worker; the Metro worker has really done nothing. But it's all these memories of feeling like my personhood was disregarded, and how badly that hurt my psyche, and how much that disrupted the development of my sense of self, that I think is being triggered. I think the gray rage is this desire to reassert control and really just personal boundaries. You can't talk to me that way, type stuff. In the story you mentioned of somebody who has the list of people they check in on every month, I think that's what it's trying to do; there's a desire to be invulnerable to other people. Because we felt so vulnerable as children and felt so put upon and powerless as children, I think.

SPENCER: Do you think that other sociopaths tend to have something similar to gray rage? Do the triggers kind of differ a lot in your experience?

JAMIE: I think the triggers are pretty much the same. I have another friend who says somebody has a false sense of their own authority, and by consequence, they have a false sense of their own safety. That's how they think of gray rage.

SPENCER: They feel nothing bad could happen to them, and they're kind of exerting authority on you.

JAMIE: They feel they can do that, and this phrase, "I'm not the one you should be messing with," or "you messed with the wrong person," is how I hear psychopaths describe it. They want to surprise the person with how forceful and extreme the reaction is to the victim trying to assert authority over the psychopath.

SPENCER: What about straight-up aggression? Let's say you're walking down the street and there's a belligerent drunk person who gets aggressive with you, threatening you. Would that trigger the same kind of thing? Or is it actually not, because it doesn't have that sense of authority and false sense of safety?

JAMIE: I think it depends. I've seen psychopaths react both ways. So actually, a psychopath I know had something like that happen to her. She was in the passenger seat of a car, and a drunk person reached in through the window, which was rolled down. It was one of those party neighborhoods with bars, and everyone was driving slowly. He reached in, grabbed her, and then asked, "Hey, do you know the directions to the whatever bar?" or "Hey, can I get a ride?" Something benign like that. She jumped out and pulled a knife on him, threatening to kill him. Then she ended up getting arrested. She knew she was getting arrested, so she threw the knife away, and they were never able to find it. They were never able to charge her with assault with a deadly weapon, so instead, it was just aggravated assault, I think, is what they charged her with. I thought that it seemed kind of aggressive that the person did that. Obviously, it's an overreaction to pull a knife out and threaten to kill somebody, but it's a little bit self-defense. Somebody shouldn't be reaching in through the window, but she had such a rap sheet of previous aggression that the judge was just like, "I see a pattern here." I think that's a good example of somebody responding aggressively to something like that. For the most part, I don't care if people say terrible things about me, like, "Oh, you're ugly," or whatever. I just think I have no sense of self for you to attack. I'm not likely to take whatever you're trying to say to me personally.

SPENCER: You give another example of something someone did that triggered gray rage?

JAMIE: Any little thing I can think of, maybe it's easier to think of examples that have happened to other people. You're already kind of 15 feet away from the entrance, and somebody's like, "Oh, don't smoke here, you can't smoke here." Any little attempt that people have to police your behavior. Somebody was like, "Oh, there's a stop sign." Even if somebody said that to me, I'd be like, "That's it. It's not your job to tell me that there's a stop sign there." It's weird because it's not a rational belief. The rational me would say, "Yeah, stop signs are there for safety, and pedestrians have a right to safety." This person probably does have a right to say there's a stop sign, but the wounded child in me thinks nobody has a right to tell me anything.

SPENCER: You mentioned your childhood. It's very hard to encapsulate a childhood quickly, but what are some of the elements that you think may have contributed to the way you are today?

JAMIE: My dad probably has a personality disorder, and my mom, I think, admitted, even just in the last couple of years, that after I was born, she had what she described as a nervous breakdown. When I was born, I had a brother who was a year and a half old, who she says now had severe gastrointestinal issues. He was having diarrhea every hour or so, and we were in cloth diapers. She either didn't have a washing machine or she didn't have a dryer to wash all these diapers. We were both in diapers. My brother had diarrhea every hour, and I had colic. My parents describe it as I would just cry 23 and a half hours every day, and they would just put me in a room and leave me to cry. I cried so badly that my navel ruptured. The healing from the umbilical cord didn't actually heal; it kind of healed, but then it ruptured again because of how much I was crying and the strength of my crying. I think that's probably not good when you look at some of these studies that show that connections to humans are so important. The first three months, the fourth trimester, are critically important to the development of someone's brain and social connections. That's my mom. And my dad, with the narcissism, mostly looked like narcissistic personality disorder. Everything was an extension of him, and he treated us all as extensions of him. I felt that was probably an onslaught on my personhood and sense of self, to have him treat me as an extension of himself rather than a separate and independent person.

SPENCER: What are a couple of examples of that?

JAMIE: One story — I don't even know if I thought to tell in the book. I thought of this more recently — I had to share a room with my two younger sisters. I grew out of toys before they did; they still had Barbies and whatever else. I got annoyed that their toys were always everywhere, so I made, with masking tape, a little section corner where my bed was, and I said, "This is my part of the room. I don't want to see any of your toys in my area. This is my area." When he got home from work and saw that, he freaked out. He was foaming at the mouth, screaming, pulling up the tape, saying, "This is not your room. This is my room. This is not your stuff. This is my stuff. Everything's my stuff." I think that particular circumstance is not the thing that hurt me; it's illustrative of his belief system and the things that would trigger him. Anytime anybody's asserting their separate independence or autonomy from him, that would be the way he would react because he found it to be so psychologically triggering.

SPENCER: So basically, he viewed you as an extension of himself, and everything that you did had to reflect well on him in some way.

JAMIE: Sometimes, not even well. Sometimes. I remember another story where I had done something. It was just kind of a childhood mistake, or just kind of a silly little thing he had caught me doing, and I pleaded with him that he not tell anybody else. Because usually that sort of stuff would be, he would tell everybody he knew, "Oh, you know, you'll never believe what Jamie did. You know, listen to this hilarious story that's so embarrassing for her." It wasn't necessarily even to reflect good on him. It was just whatever he kind of felt like he needed in the moment. He was just gonna use you for that thing without any thought about you being your own person and having your own feelings.

SPENCER: Now, why do you describe him as a narcissist rather than a sociopath? Can you explain that distinction there?

JAMIE: There's a lot of the traits and stuff, and I think that the traits are interesting and valid. And they have invalidated mostly, and you do see consistency with the traits. But to me, the way that I conceive of those two personality disorders more holistically is that the psychopath just has a very weak sense of self, almost no sense of self at all, and the narcissist has two senses of self, the one that they project out externally. "This is, you know, me," they're saying I'm superior to everybody. I'm the best. And then there's the inner sense of self, that's one of shame, which is, I'm the worst. I'm wrong. There's nothing good about me.

SPENCER: And I think these disorders are often mistaken for each other, partly because both sociopaths and narcissists tend to be lower in empathy, partly because they both tend to be somewhat grandiose, and I think also because they both act selfishly and in power-seeking ways. Do you agree with that?

JAMIE: I totally agree with that. This kind of goes to the last point you made. I think that they both tend to violate other people's personal boundaries in a very similar way. So it probably feels, if you're the person interacting, that this person seems egotistical and they're violating my personal boundaries. So they must be narcissistic or sociopath, which can confuse the two or make it hard to distinguish.

SPENCER: Yeah, I think the point you made about the sense of self is really important because the narcissists I've known have these moments where they totally crumble, and they have very low self-esteem in those moments. They feel guilty, shameful, and horrible, but then later they're grandiose again, building themselves up and bragging. It's almost like building themselves up is a way of protecting themselves from this ego collapse. Is that your experience?

JAMIE: That seems right. Recently, my dad has been talking about his food trauma as a child. He had 13 kids in his family, and his parents were totally irresponsible, in my opinion, in almost all aspects of raising him. He has every childhood trauma that you could have; he has more childhood traumas than I could imagine. It's weird, especially as he's growing older, to see him still dealing with these childhood traumas. One thing he has recently confessed is that when he was little and he wasn't getting enough food, he was worried that he would get too skinny and that his teachers or whoever else would notice he was getting too skinny and that his parents would get in trouble. That was why he developed this belief that he needed to eat all the time to prevent his parents from getting in trouble for something that was really just their doing. In these situations, it's clear he cares a lot about the people around him. If that happened to me, I'd be like, I don't care if my parents get in trouble. I don't care what other people think; I don't care if my teacher thinks I'm too skinny. If that's off my radar and has nothing to do with my primary objective at that moment, I just wouldn't care. But it's very clear to me, even with some of these traumas, that he cares a great deal about what other people think, too much, I think, about what other people think of him.

SPENCER: Yeah, because another thing that I think is really different between narcissists and sociopaths is that narcissists are extremely attention-focused. They want people to be paying attention to them, and ultimately, I think often they want people to essentially worship them; that's almost the ideal form of attention they want, whereas I suspect sociopaths are much more indifferent towards that. Would you agree with that?

JAMIE: I totally agree with that. Even growing up, one of the things that was the most triggering to my dad was that he would say that he was being mocked. "You're mocking me." And that would be, but he would make it almost like he would become this martyr in this moment of being mocked. A psychopath, number one, wouldn't care, because, again, there's no sense of self to hurt. You don't see yourself as something that could be mocked. Really, or even if you were mocked, then it's like, "Well, that's hardly me, anyways. I don't even recognize that as being me." But the psychopath seems to want to live in the shadows. So I actually think when people think of psychopaths, they're often like Donald Trump. I think a better political example of a psychopath is Dick Cheney, who is very much a shadow broker. Donald Trump is much more likely to be a narcissist because he wants the center stage, whereas a psychopath, in order to accomplish their goals, mostly wants to stay off people's radar.

SPENCER: Because if your objective is to get attention and ideally worship, you need to be front and center. You need to be in front of everyone. But if you just want to acquire power, that's not necessarily the best way to do it. Would you agree?

JAMIE: I totally agree.

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SPENCER: Another thing I think can confuse people is that because sociopaths and narcissists can both act in a low-empathy way, they might think that narcissists are incapable of empathy, but my experience is that what happens is narcissists actually do feel empathy. It's just that when other people's feelings are pitted against their own, their own always wins. For example, there's one really huge narcissist that I know who cares incredibly about animals and will make sacrifices for animals and so on. But then when a friend of his has feelings that are either his feelings or the friend's, that's when the empathy kind of goes to zero, because suddenly it's pitted against his own feelings, whereas with sociopaths, they may just lack empathy entirely in all situations. What do you think about that?

JAMIE: I totally agree. So again, using the example of my dad, he's almost maudlin with his display of empathy, sometimes. He'll show his arm and be like, "Look, I have goosebumps" because he's listening to some sad story about somebody. And then to me, though, there's actually a story, it happened when I was nine, I have this memory where we're watching TV together, and there's some kid, I think it was during the Ethiopian famine at the time. So there's some African kid with a fly flying into his eye. I'm just kind of making fun of this kid, "You can't even get the fly out of your eye." And then my dad said to me, "Have you no empathy?" I was like, "I guess I don't." Well, first I asked, "What is empathy?" He describes it to me. And then I thought, "I don't think I have empathy." So I think that's a really good example. He probably was crying at the advertisement of the African kid, and I just had this callous reaction of, "What's the deal with the fly in your eye?"

SPENCER: So if you were to watch someone being tortured, really gruesomely, parts of their body flayed off and so on, do you think you would have any emotional reaction to it?

JAMIE: I'm sure I would have some, at least aesthetic reaction to it. I definitely experience things like disgust; if something smells terrible.

SPENCER: Oh, you do have disgust, yeah.

JAMIE: I think it kind of makes sense. Disgust is probably a lizard brain emotion; you know, it's just meant to get us to not eat infection.

SPENCER: For contamination, exactly. But you don't think you would have an empathetic response; you wouldn't experience pain watching it, or suffering on their behalf, or anything like that.

JAMIE: No, I don't think that.

SPENCER: Do you think you've ever had a moment of empathy? Do you think, or do you think, as far as you're aware, you just sort of have an incapability, it's something that your brain just doesn't do?

JAMIE: Well, I don't, and I actually kind of doubt that it exists. It's how little I experience empathy.

SPENCER: Do you think that everyone's lying about it?

JAMIE: Well, I think my guess is, I believe them because I have no proof against it or whatever. But my suspicion is that it's just them projecting their own emotions. So, let's see. Say, my dad's watching the African kid, and then he's reflecting on his own feelings about having starved as a child. That's kind of my guess; it just triggers in the people their own emotional reaction about it, so that you're not feeling the emotion of the African kid, because maybe he doesn't know anything different. Maybe he's not sad at all, but you're sad, and that's what makes it suspicious to me.

cWell, I guess the way I would describe it is when I experience it, it seems to me my brain is automatically simulating what it thinks they're feeling. This happened the other day where I was walking, and someone came up to me and said, "Hey, would you want to watch this movie for three minutes? If you do it, we'll give you free popcorn." I was like, "All right, sure, whatever." So I sat down to watch this three-minute movie, and it's just a movie of animals being tortured really horribly. I just feel a visceral pain watching it; it actually hurts to see these animals being tortured. Obviously, it was kind of an animal rights thing, but it feels to me a very low level, like my brain is simulating what this pig is feeling as the pig is being tortured. And then, I can't help but feel some of it. It's obviously not as bad as being tortured, but it's a certain amount of the experience I'm kind of simulating.

JAMIE: I love, Spencer, that this happened to you.

JAMIE: Why is that?

JAMIE: Because I can just imagine it happening to you. My perspective of you is that you kind of seem— is it okay to say some things about my perspective of you? — just that you kind of seem to take things at face value. It's like, "Hey, do you want to watch this movie? It's three minutes. We'll give you free popcorn," and you're like, "Sure," open-minded, willing to not be suspicious, really, of other people, not trying to be self-protective. It seems like you have kind of a motto, maybe, of life wide open, not really afraid. But these people are probably not trying to exploit you, obviously, they're trying to get a message across.

SPENCER: I suspected that this is going to be a very unpleasant movie. I was like, "There's no way I'm going to enjoy this, trying to bribe me into doing it." But, yeah, actually, I'm curious about that. I know a lot of people that are vegetarians or vegans for ethical reasons. What do you think about that? Does that make any sense to you? Or do you think that's crazy?

JAMIE: I think that the subjective experience and suffering of an entity is not necessarily reflective of reality. I prioritize the objective because you've probably had friends who are educated, let's just say it how it is, they're white, they live in the United States, and I think they're among the top 5% of the wealthiest people in the world. But they're like, "I live in this capitalistic hellscape. My parents cut me off from my cell phone plan or whatever." And so their subjective suffering is high. It's really high. I can't always buy into this idea that subjective suffering levels are the only thing because I think some of this is probably their choice to view it this way. Does that make more sense?

SPENCER: So you're giving them more sense of personal responsibility.

JAMIE: Well, I guess I'm kind of thinking, let's just look at the objective level of your suffering, which is, you're not suffering.

SPENCER: But what about animals, though? I asked this because I'm curious about how your brain is and how it differs from other people's brains, how you process something like that. People will make big sacrifices where they won't eat certain foods just because they think it contributes to animal suffering. I'm wondering, does that make sense to you, or do you feel that's a silly thing to do?

JAMIE: I guess I just don't feel people have made a sufficient case for it. Some of it is, I don't understand nature enough. I could watch those videos, but I'm not a pig. Pigs aren't me; pigs aren't human. They can be very smart. I actually am most sympathetic to the idea of not eating octopus because octopuses seem like little geniuses. The other night, I actually have a fear of both rats and opossums because even though I know they're not rats, they're marsupials. They still look like giant rats to me, at least in my primitive phobia brain. I watched a six-minute video of an opossum eating a rat, and it starts with the head, Spencer. It was so crazy. There's sound. It's on YouTube. People can look this up. When I watched it, I thought, I don't understand nature. I just thought, why the head? I have intellectual humility when it comes to animals. I just don't understand them.

SPENCER: You mentioned fear. Fearing rats and opossums. One thing I know about a handful of sociopaths, and one thing I've asked them about is fear. Some of them say they don't think they have fear, or at least not in the normal way that other people do. What's your relationship with fear?

JAMIE: Yeah, I totally agree with that. The rat thing, you can kind of tell it's a phobia. My girlfriend, who's also a psychopath, has a phobia of spiders but is totally fine with them. If she catches a spider in her peripheral vision, she'll have that initial kind of freak out because of the phobia. I'll do the same thing with rats. If I see one, I'll have that initial kind of jump scare, and then it's fine. I can even hold them. I can even play with them or whatever. It's not that I'm actually afraid of them, and I'm not really afraid of anything else either. Sometimes that's gotten me in trouble because I will not take adequate precautions. Sometimes I do things that can maybe seem like I'm a little accident-prone. For instance, when I go mountain biking, I probably crash about 20% of the time, which I've heard is high.

SPENCER: You mentioned in your book how you cut yourself in the kitchen a lot with knives by accident. Can you talk about that?

JAMIE: Yes, I still have a plastic safety knife. It's kind of like the type that you carve pumpkins with, or little children can carve pumpkins with. I almost always use that knife here and there. I think it actually is safer for me to just use a bigger metal knife, but then I have to be very conscientious. I'm the same way with train tracks. There are some train tracks close to where I live, and I cross them basically every day, but I know that I'm bad at paying attention and being careful for my own self. I really talk to myself when I'm doing it, I'm like, "Here we come. 15 feet from the train tracks. 10 feet from the train tracks. Look right, left, right, left, right." It's this very belt and suspenders approach to kind of rein in my brain, which naturally doesn't care, doesn't even pay attention to things like that.

SPENCER: Right. Because it's not that you don't know intellectually that you could cut yourself with the knife. It's that somehow you don't have the fear of cutting yourself with a knife that causes everyone else to be cautious. Is that accurate?

JAMIE: Yeah, I would say that that's what's happening.

SPENCER: Okay, imagine you're walking down a dark alley, a big man jumps out with a gun, holds it to your head, and says they're going to kill you. Would you not feel afraid, in that case?

JAMIE: In those types of situations, I do experience hormonal changes, so cortisol, adrenaline.

SPENCER: You feel your body being amped up.

JAMIE: I can feel the physical change in my body.

SPENCER: Do you think you're afraid?

JAMIE: No, in the same way you would feel the physical change in your body of being sleepy. You have melatonin or tryptophan or whatever kind of running through your body, but you don't think of it. It's almost kind of like, and this is how I feel too. I'm not a big drinker or drug user, but when I think the most I've had is three drinks, and at that point I was like, "Oh, my body is just lethargic." That's the only way that I experience it. I'm a little stupider, and my body's moving slower. It's the same thing with fear or adrenaline. I know that I have adrenaline because my hand is shaking, but I don't identify with that state of being afraid.

SPENCER: Another person I think is a sociopath that I was talking to, I asked them if they're ever afraid and asked, "What about dangerous animals?" They told me stories about being around dangerous animals, and they just have no emotional response to them. They know intellectually that they can be dangerous, but they just don't care. This makes me think about, I've wondered, from an evolutionary perspective, why are there sociopaths? How is it that they exist in the population? One possibility is that mutations happen sometimes, but I think more likely it's kind of an evolutionary stable strategy where there are a lot of ways to survive. One way to survive is to have tight-knit groups that work together, collaborate, and have altruism, and that's what a lot of people do. But there may be another evolutionary stable strategy, which is to be fearless, to focus on your own self-interest, and to be willing to exploit altruistic people when they'll give you resources. What do you think about that theory?

JAMIE: I actually love that theory. Spencer, you've had a lot of great insights, much more than I'm used to. I don't know if it's all the psychopaths and narcissists that you've been around, but I totally agree with you about this. I'll take it one step further and say what I think is probably happening. If you take my example and extrapolate it, of course, I'm just an anecdote, but let's theorize for a moment. If psychopathy is triggered by negative childhood experiences, like the child not being safe, there's war, there's unrest. There seems to be some indication that the more war and unrest there are, the more callous people grow up to be, whether they turn into full psychopaths or not. If everything's going well, then everybody gets raised to be in these tight-knit groups. If things are going poorly, and you need people to be more defensive for whatever reason, then you end up creating more psychopaths.

SPENCER: That's really interesting. I think we probably both agree that there's a genetic component that may predispose people, but then the environment can trigger it. Is that what you think, too?

JAMIE: Yeah, I think there are actually twin studies on this that indicate that that's true.

SPENCER: Do you think that people can cooperate altruistically with sociopaths, or does it only work when there are aligned incentives so we can work together temporarily?

JAMIE: I think it depends on your definition of altruism, and I think that is a really interesting question that you could spend a ton of time on. I think you can always cooperate with psychopaths when your incentives align, and when you're able to convince a psychopath that the incentives do align, then the psychopath is a very good team member.

SPENCER: And why are they a good team member?

JAMIE: Because once their incentives are aligned that way, they're almost like a robot. They will always behave in a way that is in alignment with their incentives. Essentially, you can trust — in economics, they talk about the rational actor, who always behaves rationally — in a lot of ways, the psychopath, as long as they're not experiencing gray rage or maybe some weird hormones or a situation like that, they basically are the economic rational actor.

SPENCER: Because if they're just looking out for their self-interest, and you know what their self-interest is, you can kind of model it out and say, "Well, this is how they're going to behave." It could be more predictable than someone who is just going to act on emotion or something.

JAMIE: Because I'll tell you, Spencer, in criminal law, I went to law school, and when I took criminal law, I was so shocked by how many murders happened because of people's emotional reactions to things, often because their egos were hurt. They catch a spouse cheating, or somebody insults them in a bar, and then they kill somebody. I was so surprised by this. And then, guess what? These people are given lighter sentences because they killed somebody in an emotional state. That's considered somehow better, not worse, than the people who cold-heartedly killed somebody with premeditation. I could not understand it. It makes no sense, because, of course, with premeditation, you can at least kind of bet on that. If somebody gets a life insurance policy on you for a million dollars, chances are they're going to kill you. It's not personal; it's just business. You can predict stuff like that, but you can't really predict someone just killing somebody in a bar fight. That's what's scarier to me.

SPENCER: Maybe part of it is that there are certain situations where many humans would do something like physically harm someone. For example, let's say someone discovers that their spouse is cheating on them in a really secretive way, and then they walk in on the spouse, and there happens to be a gun right there. I think most people still wouldn't kill their spouse in that case, but a lot of people can empathize with that and be like, "Oh yeah, I could see why someone would kill a spouse in that case." Whereas, if you're thinking about the totally cold-blooded murder, most people can't relate to it; they can't empathize with it, and so they judge it more harshly.

JAMIE: That sounds right to me, but it still doesn't make sense to me. This is another one that I've watched where this guy, for some reason, is super fat, or whatever; he's just wearing no clothes, no shirt or something. He has the rifle. He keeps saying sorry to his wife. He's like, "I'm sorry, Sherry, I'm sorry, but I have to kill you," and she's recording him. She's like, "You're gonna kill me just because whatever, like, our marriage has been strained for years or something." They're just in the guy's driveway. He is just talking, "Yeah, I hear what you're saying, but I'm sorry. I'm still gonna have to kill you." And guess what? He does, Spencer; he does just kill her. To me, I'm like, "This is crazy." You guys think that somehow that has mitigating circumstances? I think this is nuts. I can't believe that we treat those people like they're so kind of irrational and so unpredictable that we don't need to keep those people in jail. They're fine somehow.

SPENCER: Wait, what were the mitigating circumstances in that case?

JAMIE: Just because he had caught her cheating on him, they somehow ended up in the driveway? Yeah, and it was videotaped. It doesn't show him, actually, the video I watched doesn't show him actually lifting up the gun and shooting her, but that is what happens, and she dies, and he's in prison, but he's only got a five-year prison sentence, or something, 10 years or something, not life, definitely not the death penalty.

SPENCER: Wow. Well, you talk about how you can kind of predict sociopaths more because they're going to act in their self-interest. But there's also a conception that sociopaths are very impulsive. If we go back to the Hare checklist, we have items like irresponsible behavior, impulsiveness, issues with relationships, difficulty controlling anger, aggression. What do you think about that? Are sociopaths more impulsive?

JAMIE: I think probably what explains some of that is that the lack of sense of self is allowing some of that stuff to happen. I think everybody has impulses, maybe even intrusive thoughts where you're at the edge of a cliff and a voice inside your head says, "Jump," but you don't jump. These types of intrusive thoughts, and you don't jump, why? Because you're like, "Oh, I have a family, or I'm a pillar of the community." Some of these reasons why you don't do things, I think, are a little bit rooted in your sense of self. And then a psychopath just has fewer of those. I think, is this one of the big five personality traits, conscientiousness? Do you know?

SPENCER: Yeah.

JAMIE: Okay, so I think some psychopaths have higher levels of conscientiousness than others, and that plays a big role, maybe even the deciding role in whether psychopaths end up acting on their impulses frequently or infrequently. So the Hare checklist was developed just looking at criminals in Canada. And if you look at criminals, probably their overall level of impulsivity is very high, so to kind of say that all these criminal psychopaths have high levels of impulsivity, some of it, I think, is overstated. You're not looking at the psychopaths who have high levels of conscientiousness when you're looking at a prison population.

SPENCER: Yeah, I'm glad you brought it up. Let's talk about prevalence for a moment, because I've looked at a bunch of different papers with estimates. It's hard to estimate things like sociopathy because it's sort of not standardized. But if we look at ASPD, antisocial personality disorder in the DSM, we can get prevalence estimates. The ones I've seen tend to vary from about 1% of the population to 5% of the population. So let's maybe say it's somewhere in the middle. Let's say it's 2% or 3%. That's actually pretty common. That means that most people have hundreds of acquaintances. It means they probably know one or more sociopaths. But most people, I think, don't know that they know any. On many occasions, I've had conversations with people about personality disorders, things like that. And generally speaking, people say that they don't know any. So, which I find fascinating, because they definitely do. They just don't realize it. Another thing is that it seems to be maybe about three times more common among males than females. I'm not quite sure why that is. Do you have any theories on why that is?

JAMIE: I do think that there is probably a gender bias in diagnosing that, maybe not in this decade, but in previous decades. And definitely kind of formed the basis for some of this research that women tended to be seen as emotional no matter what, even if they weren't portraying emotions. So there's kind of a gender disparity in borderline personality disorder, which sometimes people will call that disorder part-time psychopaths. And so I think sometimes women psychopaths were being misdiagnosed as borderline personality disorder. And the same thing with male borderline personality disorder being misdiagnosed as psychopaths. And I think that that's kind of muddied the waters for both diagnoses. If you think about antisocial personality disorder, one of the complaints about it from people who study psychopathy as kind of an independent feature is the idea that antisocial personality disorder seems to be talking about two different types of people, people who are hot-headed and people who are cold-blooded. And it's like, how could they both be antisocial personality disorder? How could they both be the same disorder?

SPENCER: Yeah, I guess my theory on that is that the hot-headedness is restricted to a very narrow range of hot-headedness, which is basically blow-ups of anger, as opposed to suddenly having extreme emotionality around fear or extreme emotionality around sadness, etc. What do you think about that?

JAMIE: Yeah, I think I understand you. I do agree that the only thing that you would have extreme emotionality about for a psychopath would be anger, that it's not sadness or fear or jealousy. And sometimes I see people be like, "Oh, this guy, he got out of prison and then immediately killed his girlfriend and his baby," and I'm like, that's not a psychopath. They're saying he has antisocial personality disorder, but I don't recognize any part of psychopathy in those types of antisocial personality disorder people.

SPENCER: Regarding the prevalence issue, I think another really strange thing is that if you go into a prison and you try to diagnose people, some of the criteria in the DSM actually will relate to basically illegal behaviors or be strongly correlated with illegal behaviors. And so if you're looking in prison, you're going to automatically get some of the criteria, which makes me think that it might end up being a kind of misleading sense of the link between criminality and antisocial personality disorder. What do you think about that?

JAMIE: 100% Spencer. I think that is the best criticism against Robert Hare's research and his kind of disciples. In this world, there are certain academic areas that end up becoming a kind of cult of personality. This is one of those areas. It is my opinion that for some reason, Robert Hare, maybe because of the PCLR, became adopted by Canadian prisons, and it was so nice if you were in charge of a prison to just be like, "Look, we're doing science. We're having them do this test, and this is predicting whether or not we should give them parole." I think that's what gave it the right amount of seemingly validity. But he got really popular with this, even though his science is anyone who's taken statistics 101 would be like, "These variables seem conflated." If you're only looking at prisoners, or if you're testing, you know, a big trait is criminality, obviously, everybody in a prison is a criminal, so they're not automatically psychopaths or antisocial personality disorder. So what are we really testing for? I think that's a big issue. I think that Robert Hare kind of knows it, in my opinion, because he sues people for defamation when they disagree with him.

SPENCER: How does that imply that he knows that?

*JAMIE: It sounds like he's really on the defensive. If you are suing your colleagues, if you were willing and open to just receive criticism about your work and about the diagnostic test that you produce, that you earn who knows how many hundreds of thousands of dollars of royalties from, he has this vested financial interest in it not being questioned, and whenever it is questioned, then he will sue the person for, I mean, not whenever, but he has sued people for defamation before for questioning the PCLR and its validity.

SPENCER: I saw one paper that claimed that for long-term prisoners in the US, 60% of them have ASPD, which is absolutely wild, and it seems to be almost impossible that that's not somehow inflated compared to what you would get if you had a less biased result. That being said, I do believe it's true that sociopaths are more likely to commit crimes than the general population. Do you agree with that?

JAMIE: Absolutely, I agree with that. But I will kind of agree with you too that these numbers are stupid and a lot of them are junk science, and they're just simple arithmetic on the back of an envelope, picking and choosing the data that fits the kind of paradigm that they're looking for. I would be shocked if the citation you mentioned is not a Kent Kiehl citation because he often does this, and he gets cited frequently for these gross statements. In fact, I'm on the advisory board for a nonprofit on psychopathy, and I got into a discussion, a debate, a little bit with the co-founder, Abby Marsh, who is a psychology professor at Georgetown. She was saying, "There is a clear connection to violence." I was like, "Looking at the citations, it's all Kent Kiehl citations. This is just pure arithmetic." I said, "You know what, Abby, you say that psychopaths commit 87% of violent crime. I can do you one better. I'll cherry-pick statistics over here and there, and now I've proven that psychopaths actually commit 116% of all violent crime." I think that illustrates how stupid it is. It's zero statistical integrity, zero academic integrity, and it's junk science, and I'm shocked that they get away with it. But for whatever reason, in this particular academic discipline, this has been kind of the norm since the 1960s.

SPENCER: If we think about behavior that people would consider ethical or unethical, and we think about why normal people, typical people, do not act in unethical ways, they obviously do sometimes act in unethical ways, but why when they don't act in unethical ways, why is that? I think there are multiple reasons. One reason is guilt; if they act in unethical ways, they'll actually be punished by their own guilt and shame, potentially. Another reason is empathy; if they're going to hurt someone, they will experience some suffering during that experience, which is kind of a punishment. So those are two reasons, but those are not the only reasons. There's also fear of punishment; they don't want to be punished, and that could be literally the emotion of fear, or it could just be irrational thinking about it. They don't want to bear the burden of punishment. Additionally, they could have principles; they could be living by principles, like religious principles or other principles they try to live by. If I think about sociopaths, they don't have some of these forces, or they have a less strong amount. They tend to have little or no guilt, little or no shame, little or no empathy, but they may still have some of the other forces; they still don't want to go to jail, they don't want to be punished. Even if they don't necessarily fear it, or don't fear it very much on an emotional level, they still don't want to be punished. Additionally, they may have principles they live by. So I guess that's kind of my model for why a sociopath wouldn't engage in unethical behavior. What do you think about that?

JAMIE: I think that's brilliant. I could read an article about that. That's a really interesting perspective on when people engage in unethical behavior. I think for a psychopath, at least from my own experience, ethics is more of an aesthetic experience. The best way to describe this is that what's ethical to one person in one situation isn't ethical to another. You learn this a lot in law, where you're told that you are just a cog in the wheel in this adversarial process, and as a lawyer, you're meant to advocate as well as you can on behalf of your client. The idea being that if the other side has an attorney that advocates as well as they can, we're going to meet in the middle, and that's one of the better ways to figure out who should be punished by society and who shouldn't be punished by society. I remember when Hillary Clinton was running for president, my hairstylist said she couldn't vote for her ever because Hillary Clinton had defended murderers. I thought, "Why are lawyers expected to not defend murderers?" You don't expect, for instance, a doctor, when somebody comes into the ER with a gunshot wound, to say, "Hold it. Is this guy a gangbanger? Did he get this gunshot wound defensively because he was trying to hurt somebody?" No, they just treat the gunshot wound. I think it's a good illustration of how ethics can change. I don't think that psychopaths tend to think about anything morally or ethically if they have principles. The best way to describe them is that it's like an aesthetic principle.

SPENCER: What do you mean by aesthetic?

JAMIE: I mean just kind of like you have a preference for certain things. You have a preference for, you know, the color yellow is an aesthetic I have. I also have an aesthetic for just letting people do their own thing, not interfering with people as much as I can, allowing people, kind of a libertarian aesthetic, a little bit. There are just ways that I think the world looks better, the same way that I think I prefer to be close to the ocean and places with trees; I have an aesthetic that way.

SPENCER: I've watched interviews with a lot of sociopaths, and what some of them say is that the way they were living their life, where they were just focused on their self-interest and kind of optimizing locally, moment to moment for just what they felt like they wanted, led to a lot of bad outcomes for them. They would, every three years, lose all their friends, get fired from their job, and have to start over. They just realized that local optimization for their self-interest actually doesn't globally optimize for their self-interest. Some of them didn't necessarily use this language, but they talked about developing principles, which are essentially heuristics that they decided to live by because they felt it would lead to better outcomes for them in the long run. It wasn't justified morally, because I don't think they have a moral sense, at least as ones, but they justified it on pragmatic grounds, saying, for example, one of them had a principle to try their best never to lie, because they felt that even though lying gave them advantages short term, it actually tended to destroy their relationships long term. So yeah, what do you think about that?

JAMIE: I totally agree. I think that these little fixes are kind of getting at the lack of something. There's a reason why they have to do these things, and it's because they don't have a sense of self in which they can just act with personal integrity. If they were able to act with personal integrity and in a way that's consistent with themselves, like a form of self-expression all the time, then they wouldn't have problems, because even if a relationship broke up, they would just think that wasn't meant to be. That's how normal people are. I think normal people just live their preferences or live their identity. Essentially, most of the choices are a form of self-expression, unless they have issues, some people-pleasing or other sorts of issues. But since the psychopath doesn't have that through line connecting things in a way that makes sense and is on a relatively straightforward path. They can get lost, kind of like Steve Jobs not using science and not treating his cancer. You can get way off the path. I read a statistic that if people are lost in the woods, they think they're going in a straight path, but really they're just going in circles. They always just go in circles. I think that's what it feels like to be a psychopath without a sense of self.

SPENCER: Do you have principles that you live by just because you found them useful to follow, even if they're not in the moment something that will necessarily benefit you right then?

JAMIE: Yeah, I will tell you about some that I historically have adopted. In college, I was like, I don't treat my friends well enough. I should make it a goal to be the perfect friend, and that way I won't have any friendships destroyed. But even with that principle, I wasn't able to actually make it happen. I guess that's the weird thing about this suggestion that I do think psychopaths develop these principles or try to adopt these principles, but I don't think they're usually successful with them long term.

SPENCER: Are there any principles that you try to live by now?

JAMIE: So now I just went to therapy, and then I just, through some kind of trial and error, discovered who I am, developed a stronger sense of self, and now I just act with personal integrity all the time. So it's just 100% me, 100% of the time.

SPENCER: So that's kind of a shocking change, right? What do you attribute that to? How did you develop a sense of self?

JAMIE: So I used the feedback method, which is just like the scientific method. You're like, "Oh, I wonder if I enjoy roller coasters or something." Let's try going on roller coasters and then just pay attention to my reactions. My therapist said that the things that were closer to my identity, more aligned with my identity, those activities I would do. Of course, they take effort to do things; going surfing would take effort to get dressed, drive over, get out in the water, and paddle. But I would also strangely be rejuvenated because of it. So I'm both tired from the effort that it required, but also this sense of rejuvenation. So that's the standard that I just used. I would try every little thing. It was just over years and years of being like, "Let's try it. Let's test it," and did I feel the rejuvenation? Yes or no.

SPENCER: Right. So talk more about that. So you created these feedback loops for yourself with self-experiments.

JAMIE: These little self-experiments, I was kind of like an anthropologist of me, and it's because I had such a weak sense of self. The problem was people would say, "Just be yourself," and I guess that was a solution. I went to therapy originally to learn how to stop manipulating people. At first, my therapist said, "You don't need to manipulate people. Just be yourself." I said, "I don't know how to do that, because what does that mean? I have no sense of self. What does that mean to choose according to my own sense of self, that I'm not connected to it?" Here's the thing, if you have no sense of self, it doesn't mean that there's no self there. You just don't have a sense of it. You're just not connected to it. You're not aware of it. It's like life before I became a scuba diver and life after. Now, I can't just look at the ocean and see the surface. I also think about what's underneath. But before, it really was just the surface, and I had no conception of what it looked like underneath. I guess that's what it was like, pre and post sense of self.

SPENCER: So then, who are you? What is your sense of self?

JAMIE: So now I have all sorts of things that I understand. I like teaching. I would say, and it seems like, is it okay to say something about you again?

SPENCER: Sure

JAMIE: You seem like a truth seeker, and I really appreciate that about you. I very much like to think that, above all, I just want to be in reality. I just want to see things as clearly as I can see them for how they are, and I'm unwilling to sacrifice anything else to live a lie, because I just value being in reality so much. I think the reality is so beautiful as it is. There are so many things in reality that are to be appreciated, that I don't need to have it be any other way. So that's probably a very dominant thing. I like order. I just like to learn. I like to understand things. I like music, but in music, I don't play my emotions. People sometimes are surprised I'm a musician, but I play in this mathematical, organizational way. I think I've always kind of liked math for that, because it doesn't pretend to be anything other than it is; it's a very pure form of knowledge. I like those forms of knowledge better, even though I understand too that the humanities or other things are equally valuable, my mind doesn't appreciate them as much as it appreciates things like math and data.

SPENCER: Now I asked my audience what questions I should ask you, and one thing that came up again and again is people saying, "Aren't they just going to lie to you? Why are you believing anything they're saying?" What's your thought on that?

JAMIE: I think, and this is going to say something a little sensitive about the general population, one thing I've kind of noticed that makes me a little sad for normal people is there seems to be a fear of being duped. I think that's probably what triggers people when they are killing their spouses when they find them cheating. Yes, they are sad about their spouse, and they're sad that maybe that relationship might be over, but I think they're very keenly triggered by this fear of being tricked. I think that most of the time, people aren't trying to trick you. It's interesting that even you, Spencer, were surprised that I'm fine with being manipulated. I would just say there are certain problems that happen so infrequently that it doesn't really make sense to take the number of precautions about it that we do. I think about this when we take off our shoes at the airport, or I can't have a five-ounce thing of water or whatever. The amount of money that we spend on taking that precaution because of a shoe bomber that never was successful, or a water bomber that never was successful, seems a little bit stupid to me, just in the sense that it's like you're wasting resources on things that don't actually give you benefit when you could be spending those resources on things that do give you benefit. That's the same way I feel about people being duped. I just think, "Oh, it's too bad that you have this fear of being duped because it's keeping you from maybe engaging in really meaningful relationships, because you're unwilling to take that chance, or meaningful job opportunities, or whatever else. You're kind of afraid that you might have made a mistake or something." I feel totally fine making mistakes. You know, Spencer, you probably are aware of the feedback loop. Mistakes just go into the feedback loop. They're just fodder for the feedback loop. It's like gasoline for a lawnmower. Mistakes have nothing bad about them, but I guess if you have an ego that's wrapped up, if you just have an ego at all, then maybe it would be harder to make mistakes than it is for a psychopath.

SPENCER: When you make mistakes, you think, "Okay, I can just use this to improve it," and you don't feel that pain of the ego that makes so many people resistant to their own mistakes. Would you agree that sociopaths tend to lie a lot?

JAMIE: I think that they tend to lie in the same sense that I think my dad, for instance, lies, which is that they are misperceiving reality. That's something my therapist said: by definition, all personality disorders have a skewed vision of how things really are, of reality. Sometimes those are their actual beliefs. I think sometimes they have such a skewed vision of reality and such an anchorless sense of existence that they have convinced themselves that there is no truth and that everything is just subjectivity, and because of that, there's almost no such thing as a lie. I think sometimes they'll just lie, being like, "I'll lie in this moment to get along and get this thing." I think you called it localized self-interest. I don't know that they lie more than normal people. I think they don't feel guilty about lying. We've talked about that.

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SPENCER: In my experience, and admittedly, I have way more experience with non-sociopaths than sociopaths, but I do have a bit of experience with sociopaths. In my experience, non-sociopaths tend to lie about different things. Non-sociopaths, for the sake of argument, lie a lot about things that will protect the way people view them and will protect people from being hurt. Let's say they don't want to come to your party. They'll tell you that they have plans, even though they don't have plans. That's a very common way of lying because they're trying to make you not feel bad, and they're also trying to make themselves not look bad or look like they don't like you. In my experience, sociopaths tend to be more comfortable with lying because they want a certain thing at that moment and they're willing to say something false just to get that thing out of you. What do you think about that?

JAMIE: I think that's probably true. I think that sometimes I've engaged in lying — I think that's true — but I would say too that sometimes the lying of psychopaths, to get something in the moment, is not necessarily always because they want that thing in the moment. For instance, I've lied before. If I think that my friend is dating somebody that's no good, and I'm like, this is a terrible relationship, I will lie and say things like, "Oh yeah, you know he said XYZ to me. He doesn't really see a future in this relationship," or whatever. I'll just lie and say whatever. It's not necessarily to get an advantage. It's to kind of put things... it's almost like a shortcut; we could just go through the next six months until you realize that this guy is a baddie, or we could just shortcut, and I could just say this lie to kind of get you to a shortcut. I think that's usually why psychopaths lie. I think psychopaths understand that there is an inherent kind of instability and that it's not sustainable to lie long term. They know that eventually the lie will be found out, and you'll be found out to have told a lie. So I think they don't fight reality too much in their lies because they know if it's too far from reality, the more unstable it is. I think usually they're just trying to — have you ever been on a hike where there are switchbacks and sometimes between the switchbacks there's a little shortcut where you can skip the switchback? — I think that's usually what their lies look like, for the most part. Often it can be for very selfish reasons. I'm not saying that's never true, especially less conscientious psychopaths who are just trying to scam people.

SPENCER: What about getting enjoyment out of manipulating people? Is that something that you experience?

JAMIE: Sometimes it did feel really pleasurable to feel like I was a puppet master, and that I could just move the strings one way or another and get certain results. I think ultimately that seemed very cheap, a cheap way to see other people. I see normal people treating people that way too. I watched this challenge recently where the wife is recording a phone call with her husband. He says, "I love you, goodbye," or "I love you, we'll talk soon." She just says, "Okay," and then hangs up. Then he calls back and is like, "Is there something wrong?" because she doesn't say, "I love you" back. I think a lot of people will do weird things like that, intentionally not text somebody back right away. They do these weird little things, and they're manipulative. They're for sure manipulative, and they're trying to get a particular result or a particular feeling or emotional reaction in the other person. I don't see that as being a good basis for any type of honest relationship. Any type of game playing, even though it might be fun — let's say I was a CIA agent, and I'm trying to stop World War Three or something. I'm sure I would get a lot of pleasure from performing that role well, including all the manipulation that it would entail. But if it came to something like a long-term relationship, I don't get pleasure from manipulation.

SPENCER: That makes me think about another difference I've observed between normie people lying and sociopaths lying, which is that sociopath lying seems more untethered to reality to me. Normies will tend to lie in a way that sort of has more, "Oh well, it's kind of true or whatever." For example, one guy I know, who I think is a sociopath, used to cheat on his girlfriend, and then he would lie outrageously when she caught him. It was as if the lies were completely untethered; he was willing to make up anything. That was my experience with him. What do you think about that?

JAMIE: I would guess, in that particular situation, that he almost wanted to get caught.

SPENCER: He told me he enjoyed getting caught.

JAMIE: I think it's a common psychopath experience, where you feel like in a relationship or something, that you're kind of stuck playing a particular role, and it's not you because you have no sense of self. You didn't choose it based on your actual identity. After a while, you get sick of playing the role. You're using all this time and energy to try to keep up appearances, and you don't want to anymore. Most of the time, when psychopaths have issues where people break up with them or they lose a job, it's self-destruction. They have stopped pretending, and they want the other person to end it, or they want to see how far they can go and get away with it, maybe a little bit. But mostly, they just want to be done. They don't want to be in that particular situation anymore. It's almost like daring the other person, are you going to finally see that I'm lying to you?

SPENCER: In your book, you have a whole chapter about the joy of destroying other people. I'm wondering, could you just tell us a little bit about that? And do you still feel that way?

JAMIE: It's so interesting that you bring that up. I forgot that chapter is in the book, and no, I don't destroy people. Now it's kind of weird. Now I feel like I should do some self-introspection about why that was true. I think that at the time, if I had to just off the cuff, say it stems from, again, this feeling of powerlessness when I was a child, over people and situations. I think that especially conscientious psychopaths tend to be a little neurotic about control, and that's kind of what the manipulation is there for. It's like, "I can't really trust you to just make the right choice on your own, so I'm going to help you make the right choice." That sort of attitude towards the people around you. I think when you're ruining somebody, it just means you have gotten under their skin so much that it's not even that you're a puppet master anymore. You're wearing them as a costume. I think that kind of gives a brush of a sense of power and control that the psychopath craves so much because they lacked it so much in their childhood.

SPENCER: I remember you gave one story about how I think you were dating a guy, and you kind of convinced him to date this other woman because you knew that she was really into him, but then you kind of did it in a way, ultimately, to manipulate her. Do you think that that's kind of the pleasure you were getting out of that?

JAMIE: Yeah, because I had a crush on her, and so he was kind of like me. He was my alter ego, in a way. But why did I get such pleasure from it? I think it's because I felt like she was totally unrequited towards me, and that this was still a way for me to kind of express my feeling of having a crush on her in a more successful way, I would have thought at the time, even though it was, as you say, untethered to reality.

SPENCER: So one time, when I was talking to someone who I'm pretty sure is a sociopath, they told me something that really surprised me, which is that they told me they're indifferent towards what food they eat. And I was like, "What do you mean? You're indifferent towards what food you eat?" Surely, chewing on cheese nips is a different experience than chewing on grapes, and you have a preference for one or the other. And they were like, "No, I don't have a preference." That kind of blew my mind. I asked them a lot of questions about this, and it made me really begin to wonder whether they can truly experience happiness or not. Then I was watching an interview with a sociopath recently, and the sociopath, just as a side comment, said offhand that they're not sure that they've experienced happiness. So I'm curious, what do you think of this? Do sociopaths experience happiness? Do they have a different relationship with happiness than other people? And what's your experience with that?

JAMIE: First about the food, I agree that that's kind of basically my experience of food, even so much that one time my brother asked me, "Hey, do you even care what you eat?" This guy who's lived with me all my life and has observed me eating, because if you just watch me eat, it's very mechanical. Food is a fuel thing. I think you're right about this; how could you be happy if everything that you're doing is not taking these small pleasures in things, but it's more like this has to be done, a food is fuel type situation? I would say that other psychopaths that I've met, even more common than perhaps a lack of empathy or guilt, the common characteristic that I've seen is that none of them seem to experience a sense of meaning about their life. Because of that, if they are temporarily happy, they can be happy in certain situations. It's not a long-lasting kind of deep happiness that they're experiencing.

SPENCER: And you do link the lack of meaning to a lack of identity?

JAMIE: I do, yeah, because I think I just kind of look, it's obviously not like a controlled experiment or anything like this. But it is suspicious that these people with a personality disorder that's often characterized by a weak sense of self, or is always characterized by issues with sense of self, that's what it means to have a personality disorder, that they're all unable to experience a sense of meaning. This suggests to me that a sense of self and some aspect of self-expression and your choices is necessary, if not sufficient, to experience a sense of meaning about things. Since then, after I made that connection, I myself have really prioritized self-expression, and that's why I kind of say 100% me, 100% of the time, because if I start kind of cheating here and there to go along to get along, I feel the emptiness come back really quickly. I used to feel kind of empty and meaningless all the time, and it often manifests itself in the form of a really terrible form of boredom that feels like it's itching from the inside. You try to alleviate it by doing all these novelty-seeking things and risk-seeking things, love triangles and whatever else, just trying to fill in the void that's missing because you're not living a life that's truly yours. You're just living kind of like an Excel spreadsheet.

SPENCER: What is something that's genuinely really pleasurable to you?

JAMIE: I actually really enjoy spending time with children. It's one of my favorite things to do. I think that children have a lot in common with psychopaths. One of the things is that I think psychopaths are kind of childish. They're childlike. I think they don't tend to have a lot of ego in things the same way children do. They don't tend to care what other people think of them. I have a nephew right now who's in first grade, and he does these very elaborate individual play activities where he's kind of dancing a little bit, doing choreography, talking, and a little bit of singing, and he can do it for hours just by himself. I really admire that about children because they seem to be living 100% as themselves all the time. I feel like I lived so much of my life, living so little of myself, so little of the time, that I think their way of being seems very joyful and very meaningful to them.

SPENCER: Do you feel happy when you're with children?

JAMIE: Oh yeah, I totally feel happy when I'm with children. I love hearing their little commentaries. They're willing to say things that other people aren't willing to say. It makes me sad sometimes to be around adults because I perceive in them reluctance that makes their lives hard. They're not willing to take risks. I read a quote recently that said something like, "Everything that you desire is on the other side of fear." That made me really sad for people because I thought, "Wow, if that's true for most people — and most people experience so much fear — then they truly aren't getting the things that they desire." And it's just because of fear, whereas I don't experience fear at all. It just made me a little bit sad for them.

SPENCER: Do you worry? Do you have worries about the future?

JAMIE: I have no anxieties. Probably I have guessed about what might be in the future. I'm a typical Mormon. I have a food storage because I think anything could happen. I have plans for where to spend the apocalypse and things like that. I have plans, but I guess I don't really have worries.

SPENCER: When you think about the future and you think about bad things that might happen, does it feel unpleasant to think about the bad things that might happen, or is it kind of just fine?

JAMIE: It's fine. It's not even that I just focus on negative things. Sometimes I feel it's easier for me to get in touch with the future or my future self than it is for other people, for whatever reason. For instance, I fully funded my retirement by the time I was 30 because I thought, "Well, I don't need this money. A lot of this money I don't need, so I can just take care of the future and not have to worry about anything about the future, which will allow me more freedom today."

SPENCER: That's interesting and maybe having fewer emotions helps with that. What do you think?

JAMIE: I think probably for sure, especially when it comes to money. Having fewer emotions about it, I think there's kind of a fear of maybe normal people, maybe some psychopaths, too, of not acting, or kind of not wanting to think about this right now, because then I'll have to worry about it. So I, for instance, just started a little family chat, a personal finance club, because I thought, I'm a registered financial advisor, and now my niece got married, and so they're like adults now. I thought I have told them nothing about money, and I want them to not fear money, and not to be fearful about things like money and their career and making mistakes and just trying things out, because I have this deep sense that the future is really unknowable, mostly, and that there's not really a smart or dumb decision when it comes to the future, because it is so unknowable. But as much as you wouldn't feel stupid if you never used the food storage, I wouldn't feel stupid if I died before I got a chance to use my retirement account. I wouldn't feel stupid or like I was a dope for doing it, or that it was a wrong choice. But I think other people do. They're worried about making mistakes, especially when it comes to the future, and I just think hardly anything's a mistake, because you don't know who is going to be President of the United States next year. There's so little that we know, and that's just such uncertainty. But I feel comfortable in the uncertainty in a way that I don't think that other people I see around me are. So I think they kind of intentionally out of sight, out of mind about some of that stuff.

SPENCER: Do you think that other people kind of need to feel control, so they have to kind of underestimate the uncertainty, just to make themselves feel okay?

JAMIE: Yeah, I totally think that.

SPENCER: Whereas you just don't care, you're just not afraid. You're not afraid, so you can just kind of embrace the incredible uncertainty of everything.

JAMIE: Yeah, I think a lot of it has to do with the lack of fear. It doesn't bother me to just acknowledge that, even in the present, the present is so unknowable, let's be honest. Even the past often. But the present is the fog of war. We think we are seeing things truly, but who knows whether we are or not?

SPENCER: Going back to the food thing just for a second. I think this idea that not caring what you eat would be mind-blowing to most people. It's just so different from other people's experience. What else does that extend to? Things that everyone else seems to really care about, and they find some things much more pleasurable than others, and you're just kind of totally indifferent.

JAMIE: I wonder if some of it is peer pressure. I see people getting caught up in the clothes they wear, the way their body looks, or their appearance. I don't care about those things, so that's a big thing. I don't care what other people think about me. There are certain things I care about, like sleep, because I feel more myself when I'm getting good sleep. I even think, what are some other pleasures?

SPENCER: There are physical pleasures, like massage, relaxation pleasures, or sex.

JAMIE: Yeah, I actually think that psychopaths are known to be good at sex. Speaking of sex, I think it's kind of another sad reason that most people are self-conscious about the way they look and the way they're being perceived. When I first found out that some people prefer to have sex with the lights off, I just could not understand it. I was like, "What? Are they saving money on electricity?" Obviously, that can't be it. That thought would never have occurred to me. I don't think I've ever done that [laughs]. What a weird thing. I do think that in my sexual experiences, my partners were probably like, "Are you into this at all?" Sometimes, I was into it physically, but I wasn't into it emotionally. I wasn't connected to them. It wasn't a form of self-expression at all.

SPENCER: It physically felt good, it was pleasurable, unlike food.

JAMIE: Yeah. But, honestly, Spencer, masturbating was more pleasurable or equally pleasurable, because I had no need for there to be a connection. It was just the....

SPENCER: Pleasure of it?

JAMIE: Exactly.

SPENCER: Then I wonder, why is it that food is different? That's kind of interesting to me that another thing people find pleasurable would be listening to beautiful music. Does that give you pleasure?

JAMIE: Yeah, yes, listening to music does. So I should clarify. I actually corrected my brother when he said the thing about the food. I said, "It's not that I don't get pleasure out of the food. It's just that, in a way, too — and maybe your friend kind of relates to this — I had a sense that the pleasure was my brain lying to me."

SPENCER: What do you mean?

JAMIE: The brain is, "Yeah, eat sugars and fats. That's what we need to do because the long winter is coming soon, and we need to fatten up, and these sugars and fats are scarce, and so we need to eat a ton of them." But then I eat them, and actually, my whole family kind of has bad digestion. My brother that I've mentioned will get sick often from eating a donut; that amount of sugar would make me sick to my stomach. My body doesn't like it, so I've just kind of gotten used to being like, "Okay, brain, I can hear you kind of going off about something," and I view it the same as I do the phobia to rodents, where I'm like, "Okay, I can see that you're pre-programmed to keep repeating this, but I'm not going to listen to you because you're basically lying to me." I think that's why I see the brain as lying to me. So, I'm disillusioned about food, is a good way to put it. I don't believe the story the brain tells me that a donut is going to make me feel so good.

SPENCER: So it's almost like you see it as kind of an illusion that the brain's creating, like, it just is creating this illusion of pleasure because of fat and sugar, or an illusion of fear because you spot a rat in your peripheral vision, but then you're like, "Brain, I don't believe that story."

JAMIE: Exactly. I still enjoy trying different tastes. I'm like, "Oh, this is weird, very tart or very whatever." So it's not as if I have no pleasure from food and textures too. There can be textures that I find like, "Wow, this hot brownie and cold ice cream can be very engaging, interesting, the same way that good music can be."

SPENCER: But pleasure from sexuality doesn't feel like your brain's lying to you in the same way.

JAMIE: No, it does. But I still kind of, in fact, use it almost as an Advil. Sometimes I'll be like, Oh, you know what my body needs right now is just to be flooded with all of this serotonin or whatever else." So I'll just kind of be like, I'm not feeling that well, so I'll masturbate.

SPENCER: You mentioned in your book that there's a really high rate of bisexuality among sociopaths. Why do you think that is?

JAMIE: I think my explanation for it, other people may have different theories, but I would think that it's related to the lack of sense of self. I don't really have a strong sense of myself as being female, nor white, nor really even American, nor Mormon, nor any of these, nor in my 40s, nor my height. I know these things are true about me, and I know that I'm treated differently because those are my characteristics, but I don't really identify with them. I don't feel that I am those things. And so I think when you have that really fluid sense of the concept of gender at all, then it kind of seems weird when other people have a hang-up. It almost seems like a hang-up about gender.

SPENCER: That makes sense to me, sort of to a degree, but there's another element of that that doesn't make sense to me, which is that I think that most people who are straight feel that the presentation of someone of the opposite gender is arousing, but the presentation of someone of their own gender is not. At a very low level, they don't feel aroused looking at a person who's of the same gender. So do you find that people of any gender are equally arousing to look at?

JAMIE: So I think this would be a good question for a male psychopath, because I think that women, in general, I think they've done research about this, where women will get aroused at a greater variety of photos than men do, generally speaking. The theory is that they have had more, historically, quantities of non-consensual or unwanted sex in which they still had to get lubricated, because if they're not lubricated, then they're at a higher risk of disease transmission. It will tear the skin, and then once there's torn skin, they can get infected easier. For me, I've never had this natural only to the opposite sex response. So once I masturbated, it was the summer, and I saw my sweatpants up in the closet, and I just thought, "Oh, I remember what it's like to wear sweatpants, and it's nice and kind of chill, and it was just such a nice vibe that I just masturbated on that."

SPENCER: On that concept, that's interesting, yeah, because you're absolutely right, more women are bisexual than men are, for sure. There are interesting studies where they found that, for example, women seeing video of animals having sex was more likely to make them lubricated, whereas men don't seem to get aroused by that. The theory is it's just a self-protective mechanism. So yeah, I agree with you there, but it's just interesting to me. If it's really true that sociopaths tend to be much more likely to be bisexual, I guess my curiosity is, do they find both genders equally arousing? Or is it more that sexuality for sociopaths is a different sort of thing than it is for non-sociopaths?

JAMIE: Yeah, that's a really insightful question. I think that what you have suggested is that maybe sexuality is a different thing for psychopaths, and maybe it's kind of related to the sense of self, but in a different way. Maybe sexuality for, let's say, a normal man also kind of entails the way that you're viewed socially, and also entails your sense of ownership over something. I could see how it would potentially interact with your sense of self in dozens of different ways, not just your conception of gender.

SPENCER: Is there anything about non-sociopaths that you can't relate to at all? They just feel completely alien or crazy to you.

JAMIE: The craziest thing that I see non-sociopaths engage in is mob mentality behavior. That sort of stuff really freaks me out. That always kind of freaked me out. In fact, I just went to visit South Korea, and I went to visit the site of the crowd crush from 2022, the Halloween crowd crush. I think it was in Itaewon, and 159 people were killed.

SPENCER: Well, it was just a lot of people there for Halloween or something. Why did so many people get crushed?

JAMIE: Yeah, that's kind of what I wondered, too. I kind of wonder why people willingly walk into situations where they know there's a point where you can walk back, and then there's a point that you can't walk back. But it was for Halloween. They were all there kind of partying. I think maybe there was an event going on. People suggest that it was because of pent-up desire to socialize from the pandemic. So it was October 22, kind of the first big thing, and that particular neighborhood has pretty narrow alleys. You go there now, and it's actually kind of crazy because I thought I was in the wrong alley at first. I was like, "Oh, it's here, and I can kind of see why, because it narrows, and maybe people wouldn't be able to see that it narrows." When I went to the real alley where it happened, I was like, "I can't see why it happened here instead of other places." Mob mentality, probably, like I said earlier, impulsivity or things are just symptoms of a weak sense of self. That mob mentality is just a symptom, an odd kind of side effect of these tight-knit connections that people have with each other. They feel connected emotionally, and the mob mentality allows things to spread faster. For whatever reason, things that are irrational, irrational beliefs, kind of like the way that my brain tries to lie to me about the rats. The mob mentality is just people believing the lie that their brains are telling them. Sometimes I experience this on the freeway, especially since I just drove quite a bit, over 20 hours this past weekend. Sometimes there's a slowdown where everybody's slowing down because there's something that we all need to slow down for. Sometimes there's a slowdown that's inexplicable. I see everybody slowing down, and I'm like, "Why are you slowing down? You're in the far left lane. There's nobody in front of you. Why did you just touch your brakes?" I kind of don't understand stuff like that, but I assume that it's the same kind of connectedness that allows society to flourish.

SPENCER: Do you feel that people copy each other in a way that you don't understand?

JAMIE: Oh, totally. And the other thing that's kind of weird to me, I've really tried to, especially in the past couple of years, see reality more clearly. And what that means, obviously, is that I have to give up wrong beliefs, but also I have to start learning to see things that I've never seen before. And that's really weird, because at least with wrong beliefs that you already know, you have a collection of your beliefs, and some of these are wrong, but to learn to see things that you haven't seen before is really odd, because you don't know what you're looking for. You've obviously missed it for however many decades, and now you're trying to see it for the first time. That's kind of a tall order. So one of the things I've started trying to do is expose myself intentionally to things that I haven't been exposed to before, including following different social media accounts that normally wouldn't interest me, etc. And in some of these social media accounts that I follow, I've noticed that there is kind of a consumerism that strikes me as being really odd, like there's this one where the son is giving his dad a Bentley automobile, a really fancy automobile. And it's like, when you're able to give back to your parents and stuff. And I just think, "Wow, this is crazy, because people are literally dying in Africa." And it's not like I'm one of these effective altruists. It's not like I'm kind of like, you know, and so therefore, whatever. But I just think, "Why does your dad care so much about the Bentley? Why does anybody care about the Bentley? If the Bentley was a better automobile, I would totally get it. If it was like a horse or something you didn't have before, I would get it. Even just a nice Honda Civic, I would get it because everybody needs a car, maybe if you live in a place that needs cars or whatever." But this idea of a Balenciaga t-shirt, a white t-shirt that says Balenciaga being important to people is really weird to me. I really can't understand it. I think, "How much suffering do you go through? Do you put yourself through because you have chosen to prioritize this of all things?"

SPENCER: Funny. I think in many ways, I'm almost the opposite of a sociopath. But that's something I can completely relate to you for. When you know the store Supreme sells a brick, it just blows my mind that anyone would buy that. It makes so little sense to me that it makes me feel like an alien.

JAMIE: And really smart people can do it too. I remember Twitter during the height of — are they called NFTs? — NFTs, non-fungible tokens. And there was this woman who was really smart. I followed her for various reasons. She was the founder of a startup, all these things. And she was kind of talking about how she found these NFTs that she really liked. And she was thinking about doing it, but $10,000 is a lot of money. And other people were saying, "Hey, if you want it, you know, get it or whatever." And by the time I was reading the tweets, she had already changed her avatar on Twitter to the NFT, so I knew that she had bought it. But I just think, "What a weird thing. Was that really worth $10,000 to you? And why?"

SPENCER: It may be hard for you to process just how much people care about other people's impressions. It's kind of hard for me to process that. One thing that listeners asked when I was asking them, "What should I talk to you about?" a bunch of them were curious, why do you do interviews? What do you get out of them?

JAMIE: I have a couple agendas. I'll just be honest about them. One of them is to reach other psychopaths because I think I was lost in the world before somebody told me, "Hey, I think there's a pretty good chance that you're a sociopath." That helped me because then I could look up other resources and kind of understand that there was a pattern to my behavior. One of the agendas is just, some people out there, Spencer, some of your listeners, are psychopaths without realizing it.

SPENCER: They definitely are, for sure.

JAMIE: So that's one of the agendas. The second agenda is that there is a stigma that hurts psychopaths, and I'm trying to disillusion some of that, trying to help people understand, "Yes, this is true. They're more likely to be criminals, but there are also these aspects which seem worse than they are, and also normal people are scary too." Here's one fun fact. Speaking of back of the envelope, quick and dirty calculations, once I was able to cherry-pick data and make it so that if you take two humans, genderless, no psychopathy, just blank humans, and if you make one of them male, they're more likely to be violent than if you make the other one a psychopath. Maleness correlates more strongly with violence than psychopathy.

SPENCER: That's interesting. Certainly, maleness correlates strongly with violence. If you look at violent criminals, the vast majority of them are men, for sure. Not only that, age also plays a role. It's really young men that commit the vast majority of violence. Sixty or seventy-year-old men barely commit violence, which is fascinating. But surely we agree that sociopathy is also an additional risk factor on top of it. Would you agree with that?

JAMIE: Yes, I agree with that, but it's kind of like if you're thinking, "Oh, I should be so afraid. I would never let a psychopath in my life," but you do have a 22-year-old male in your life, it'd be like, "Wow, that's a little inconsistent." They're about the same risk.

SPENCER: Yeah, what would you say to someone who's scared of sociopaths, who doesn't want to interact with them? I have to say, if I'm around a sociopath, I do feel like it takes me longer to understand them and trust them.

JAMIE: I think that is a big hurdle. There are so many half-truths or non-truths out there about psychopaths that you're just not used to dealing with them, mostly because they know that if they don't put on a mask, they will be prejudiced against. You will fire them or whatever. I've been fired several times for being a psychopath, and I get that there are costs to just being honest and not lying, pretending at funerals, etc. I think that freaks people out to understand that psychopaths are often pretending to not be psychopaths. That sounds really devious. Why are they pretending? Are they trying to trick me? Yes, they are trying to trick you, but it's mostly to stay off your radar. They just don't want to experience your prejudice. I think that as psychopaths become more open and as people start to understand who psychopaths are and learn to adjust their expectations, things are going to be okay. I use examples of how people treat children differently. No one feels it's a terrible imposition to treat children differently. They treat people on the autism spectrum differently. We treat older people differently. I hope that psychopathy will be one of these categories where we all just kind of know, like, "Don't go to Jamie for emotional support, but do go to her for financial advice," that type of stuff.

SPENCER: Do you think it's fair to say that if someone meets a sociopath, they don't really know them yet. They don't know their general personality characteristics, but they just know they're a sociopath. They should kind of model that person. That person is going to act in their own self-interest, and if they understand that, will it help them deal with the person better?

JAMIE: Yeah, I think that is probably the best way to conceive of a psychopath. Just think of them as an eight-year-old child who's basically acting in their own self-interest. You can ask them, "Hey, it's really important to me to do X, Y, Z," and if you're important to them, then they're probably going to make your priorities their priorities too, because that helps them in the relationship.

SPENCER: Yeah, I think what people find really difficult is that there are so many other forces driving a lot of human behavior, such as really caring about what others think of them, which sociopaths tend to care about a lot less, or empathy, which sociopaths tend to not have, or, let's say, a sense of identity, of being consistent with yourself, which sociopaths tend to not have. I think that makes it very disorienting. It makes it hard for people who are not used to that to switch into the mindset of, "Oh, this person is going to do what's in their own self-interest, and all these other heuristics and rules I've learned about human behavior are suddenly not going to apply. If I try to predict based on them, I might get mispredictions."

JAMIE: Right.

SPENCER: Are you able to tell who's a sociopath? Can you pick up on it? Is it sort of like gaydar, where a lot of gay people can figure out who's gay, even if straight people can't?

JAMIE: You know, I actually, I'm in a relationship with a woman, but I don't have gaydar either. I feel like I don't know. Some psychopaths are like, "Oh yeah, I totally can." And I've only successfully done it once, and it's because the person, I think, almost intentionally gave a tell. I think that's kind of interesting about psychopaths. They're almost like serial killers in this way, and in a lot of ways, I bet, too. There are some serial killers that are almost asking to get caught about something or another. BTK was like this. He had successfully gotten away with the crimes, but then started communicating with the cops for some reason, just asking to get caught. So that's the only time I've been able to recognize a psychopath is when they've either just flat out told me, or they've said something that obviously shows a lack of empathy or whatever else.

SPENCER: That's fascinating, because it sounds like I identify them more often than you do. I should say the way people wonder when I tell them I know a bunch of sociopaths, like, "Well, how do you know that you know them? Maybe you're just falsely identifying." The reality is, I always just ask them, and this is also shocking to people, because they think, "Well, you've just asked them if they're a sociopath?" The thing is that when I ask them, they always pretty much react the same way, which is, they're like, "Oh yeah, I've thought about that. Do you think I'm a sociopath?" Which is very fascinating to me, because I don't think that's how people think they would react.

JAMIE: I agree with you, Spencer, and I think that's an interesting way to react, which is, "Oh, I thought about that. Hahaha." They're not like, "Does that make me a bad person or whatever?" I think that is a great question to ask them, because I bet that is probably one of the best, almost like a litmus test for it.

SPENCER: The weird thing is that I think if they were offended, they would be much less likely to be a sociopath, exactly. I suppose they could feign being offended, but they don't. For some reason, they don't feign being offended, maybe because it's such a weird question asked that they don't have a mental model of the right response.

JAMIE: My suspicion about this, Spencer, is that, unlike narcissists, their worst nightmare is that somebody thinks they are a narcissist; they don't want to be found out. They don't want their true self found out by anybody at all. I think that psychopaths actually crave somebody understanding them as their true self. They get it so rarely.

SPENCER: Yeah, my experience has been they're super open about discussing it. I've spent hours talking to Jose Bowser about, "What is it like to be you, and what's your experience?" Obviously, today in our interview, but I've done this on quite a number of occasions before, and they always seem really engaged and interested in it; they don't seem to be hiding it. Before this interview, there was one person that was really upset that I was interviewing a sociopath, and they said they're just going to lie to you about everything. Nothing they say will be true, but in my experience, actually, sociopaths are quite interested in understanding themselves and figuring themselves out. It's actually in their interest to be open about it because it helps them process themselves. What do you think about that?

JAMIE: I think that's exactly right.

SPENCER: So you've been very generous with your time. I'll wrap up in a moment, but there's just a couple more things I wanted to ask you about. One is, you've mentioned that you're Mormon, and I'm curious, how do you relate to Mormonism? Do you try to follow the rules? And if so, why?

JAMIE: Before therapy and before a sense of self, I thought of Mormonism as just another mask that allowed for certain connections to people, kind of like a family friend vibe, where people would do you favors or provide different opportunities, almost like a Mormon mafia type thing. I appreciated certain parts about it, but not reliably. That would be true of my whole life experience; I appreciated parts about music, but not reliably, or appreciated parts about the law, but not reliably. It wasn't until I had a sense of self that I was really able to engage with my passions, and Mormonism could have fallen by the wayside. There were certainly other things that I used to do, like ruining people, that are no longer a fashion of mine, that have fallen by the wayside. But for some reason, Mormonism continues to resonate with my identity. I go to church, but I don't feel worse; I feel better. My anthropological take on everything is to keep doing the stuff that makes me feel better and stop doing the stuff that makes me feel worse, so I've just kept going to church.

SPENCER: Better, not in that you're getting exactly what you want in that moment, but there's some kind of broader sense of better.

JAMIE: Right. Yeah, yeah. Better in the same way that eating fiber is better.

SPENCER: Yeah. Eating sugar is better. Let's say someone listening to this is not sure if they're a sociopath, what would you recommend they should do?

JAMIE: Honestly, I think listening to some of these interviews that are out there with psychopaths, or reading books, there's my book, there's also Patric Gagne's book, there's psychopathy.org which has some assessments that you can find out if people are interested in therapeutic approaches for themselves and others. They also have a list of therapists that are willing to treat psychopaths. I think just learning, letting it be a form of self-exploration. It doesn't necessarily result in any answer, and that's probably the best way of always approaching anything in life, actually, is just trying to keep an open mind and not worry about what the answer will ultimately be.

SPENCER: All right, last question for you, what do you think the best way is for sociopaths to be integrated in society where sort of everyone benefits, sociopath benefits, but society benefits too.

JAMIE: Yeah, that's a really good question. And I think that I don't advocate, for instance, that psychopaths be treated less harshly, for instance, for criminal penalties or something. I have a pinned tweet: I'm not saying that sociopaths aren't responsible for their actions, but they're certainly not responsible for being sociopaths. So that's how I basically feel about it, is that they are responsible for their actions, and they need that feedback when they break up with them, or put them in jail, or whatever. They need that negative feedback in order to have any kind of incentive to change. If they're like Excel spreadsheets, and they're just kind of running off their best interest, there needs to be that penalty aspect. They're like children that way. If you don't discipline children, then it's worse for them. So I think that's one thing, is to kind of just treat them with the normal consequences that you would give other people. I think, though, we can also, if we can get away from the disgust that people experience with regard to finding out that somebody is a psychopath, or some of these other negative emotions that are kind of moralistic. They're not even moralistic. They're more of an aesthetic preference. I don't like people who don't experience empathy. Psychopaths haven't chosen to be without empathy; they've made no such choice. And it's kind of ableist to expect people who have no capacity for empathy to have empathy. So I think that if we can make those adjustments where there's more openness to the limitations that a psychopath has as a result of this disorder, and willingness to not force them to mask, if they're not crying at a funeral, that's okay. I think we've done this with other disorders in the past, like with autism spectrum disorders, where we don't expect them to make eye contact, or these other things, or we stopped shaking hands because of the pandemic. We can change some of these superficial ways that we expect people to show up in society, that will allow them to show up more as their whole selves, and that will improve all of society, not just the integration of psychopaths into society.

SPENCER: Jamie, thank you for coming on.

JAMIE: Thank you so much, Spencer. It was such a pleasure. You had so many insights. I really enjoyed this.

[outro]

JOSH: A listener asks, "I'm not sure multiple intrinsic values can exist because it seems like ultimately they are all just instrumental towards some kind of positive valence, which could manifest as happiness or a sense of meaning or just pleasure. What are your thoughts about this?"

SPENCER: It's funny to get this question now because I recently wrote an essay called "Are Happiness and Wellbeing the Only Things That People Value?" We discussed this question. I think that happiness and well-being are related in some way to many things that people value, but often they relate quite indirectly to things people value. And I don't think they cover everything that people value. So let's take some examples. Clearly, people value their own happiness, their own suffering, right? Okay, those are easy cases. Take something like how we're remembered after we die. Many people seem to value this. Do they value it only because of the good feeling that it gives them in the moment they think about it? I don't think so. I think that they — actually, many people would be willing to sacrifice some happiness in the moment to be remembered better after they die. So I don't think everything can be boiled down to just happiness and well-being. I also don't think we should expect it to from the point of view of evolution. Evolution doesn't care about happiness. Happiness is just one tool of evolution. Evolution cares — you know, the thing it's optimizing for ultimately is survival of our genes, right? So whatever propagates our genes, it's not the same as maximizing happiness, right? It's completely different, actually. Happiness is just a tool for gene maximization. So with that in mind, I think we should expect people to have a bunch of intrinsic values. But the most direct evidence of that is you just talk to people. We put people through a little training module teaching them about what intrinsic values are and a quiz about which things are intrinsic values or not to help make sure they understand. And then we ask them about their intrinsic values. And people list many, many, many things. And a whole bunch of those are not related to happiness or well-being. So yes, okay, you could say, well, maybe they're confused. Maybe they're wrong. But I think a reasonable starting point is they seem to have intrinsic values. They say they do. We should expect evolution to produce them. I don't see why we would think that people only have one, even though some people report only having one.